5 Wine Components And How To Describe Them Like An Expert

How often have you run across these phrases when you’re reading a
wine review: “highly structured," “crisp,” “bright," “firm
tannins,” “fine-grained tannins.”

How do they translate into your flavor experiences?

It’s nothing too mysterious. “Structure” is most often used in
reference to relative levels of acid (especially whites) and/or
tannin (reds). But there are other things that come into play
such as alcohol, sweetness and body.

Isolated, none of these components are tasty or interesting.
Think of them as the framework of the wine, just waiting to be
fleshed out by delicious things like fruitiness, fermentation
character, oak, floral character, herbaceousness, minerality,
etc.

Fortunately, Mother Nature has made it remarkably easy to detect
the relative levels of the main wine components. Grab a glass of
red wine and taste as we go and you’ll see what I mean.

Alcohol is the only one of the main components that has an aroma,
so you’ll have to rely on your palate to differentiate between
the rest. Using the slurping technique will really help.

For the uninitiated: Take a little sip of your wine. Taste good?
Now, all you have to do is take another small sip and hold it in
your mouth. Purse your lips and pull some air in through your
teeth and over the top of the wine (kind of like whistling in
reverse). Swish it all around your mouth, like mouthwash, and
chew on it a little. Wow – flavor explosion in your head, right?
Now, we’re ready to get started.

Let’s start with acid:

Of course, acid has a tart flavor. Incidentally, if you refer to
high-acid wine as sour you’re going to get a very sour look from
the winemaker. In wine parlance, sour means spoiled, as in gone
to vinegar!

If you want to become acquainted with the tart flavor of
relatively high-acid wine, some common white examples are
sparkling wine, Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling. Northern Italy
turns out a lot of lean, zippy reds.

Some wines, especially reds, are so flavorful that it’s difficult
to taste the acid. Usually, you can still gauge it. As you taste
the wine, notice the way your mouth begins to water, especially
along the sides of your tongue and under it. Thus, the birth of
the phrase “mouth-watering acidity.” Now that you’ve noticed it,
you’ll begin to differentiate the levels as you taste different
styles of wine. Generally, white wines are higher in acid than
reds. Well-made dessert wines can really turn on the water works
in your mouth because the sweetness needs to be balanced by a
high level of acidity.

Why do you care? Acid is important because it
keeps the wine fresh and lively on the palate. It has a cleansing
effect and makes the wine easy to pair with food. Acid is a
great, natural preservative! Wines that are high in acid (but
balanced) will have fairly long lives and a better chance of
retaining their fruitiness and freshness as time goes by.

The source: The grapes, although acid additions
are permitted in many wine regions. As the grapes ripen, the
sugar increases and the acid decreases. At harvest time, timing
is everything!

Do you have a sudden urge to brush your teeth after tasting red
wine? Then you recognize tannin – it’s that simple. It runs
around your mouth seeking out protein and then clings to it,
which explains the drying sense of grip on your gums – all over
your mouth, really – and the furry teeth. The flavor of tannin is
extremely bitter, so winemakers try to craft the wine in such a
way that you feel it, rather than taste it. As you taste your
wine now, you will probably remember other wines you’ve tasted
that were more tannic or less tannic, so you'll begin to
recognize relative levels.

Acid accentuates the hardness of tannin, so high-acid wine that’s
also tannic can be hard to enjoy when it’s young. As the wine
ages, the tannin enlarges with oxidation and gradually falls out
of the wine as part of the sediment. So, the wine gradually
softens and the texture becomes more velvety over time.

Why do you care? Tannin is an important part of
the texture of red wine – when managed properly it gives it a
nice chewiness. Like acid, tannin is a natural preservative. It's
part of a group called polyphenols, which are anti-oxidants that
prolong the wine's life. The more tannic the wine, provided it's
well made and well-balanced, the longer its life in the bottle
when stored properly.

The source: The biggest source of tannin in wine
is the grape skins. Other sources are the seeds, stems and oak
(wine barrels contribute wood tannin if they're relatively new).
Red wines are almost always higher in tannin than white because
the winemaker must ferment the juice and skins together to get
the purple color. Whites receive little or no juice to skin
contact.

Descriptions: Astringent, drying, grippy,
chalky, chewy, hard, coarse

Antonyms: Soft, smooth, silky, round, velvety,
mellow

Alcohol

Isolated, alcohol smells sweet. Give the wine a good swirl for a
few seconds and pop your nose in the glass. If you actually smell
something sweet that reminds you of rubbing alcohol or feel what
seems like a heat-driven tickle in your nose, the alcohol is too
high for the style of the wine – it’s not balanced. You’re not
supposed to notice the alcohol, it’s just supposed to be there.

The mouth-feel: Do you notice that your mouth
feels warmer than it did before you sipped the wine? That's the
alcohol talking and in a very pleasant way. If it's quite warm,
or almost hot, the alcohol content is on the high side. If you
actually taste the alcohol or feel like a fire-breathing dragon,
it’s too high, not balanced. It seems to be most noticeable in
the back of your throat. The alcohol also adds an oily, viscous
sensation.

Why do you care? Alcohol gives the wine a great
deal of its body or “heft.” A wine that’s meant to be robust in
style feels thin and unsatisfying on the palate if the alcohol is
too low. Alcohol is yet another preservative, which explains why
Port-style wine can live so long in the bottle and actually keeps
better than table wine once it’s opened (sugar also helps in that
regard).

The source: The sugar in the grapes at harvest.
In many parts of the world adding sugar is permitted. It’s called
Chaptalization. During the fermentation the sugar is converted to
alcohol.

Well, this one’s easy – we all know sweetness, right? And that
“dry” is the opposite of sweet? Sweetness also has a pleasant,
slippery sort of mouth-feel.

Since sugar is so familiar, this is a good time to talk about
perception vs. reality. The level of acidity can really play
games with your head in gauging sweetness. It makes the wine seem
less sweet than it is. Sparkling wines called "brut," for
instance, are considered dry, but they may actually have as much
as 1.5 percent sugar (our threshold for noticing sweetness in
wine is most often at about .5 percent). They taste dry because
they are so high in acid.

Try making some overly-tart lemonade and give it a taste. Then
add a little sugar. Keep tasting and adding sugar until you reach
a pleasant balance. Notice how the sugar has softened and rounded
out the acid sensation? The acid level hasn’t changed, but your
perception of it has.

Fruity flavors can also trick your palate into detecting sugar
that isn’t actually there. The phenomenon is called
auto-association.

If dry is .5 percent or less, off-dry can be up to about 4
percent sugar, medium sweet up to 10 percent sugar and anything
over that is very sweet, indeed. But our perception? That’s
another matter.

Why do you care? Who doesn’t love something a
little sweet from time to time? Plus, besides its rounding effect
on overly tart wine, a bit of sugar can cover a lot of sins in
the production of inexpensive wine, and it’s another of Mother
Nature’s natural preservatives.

The source: The grapes. In most cases the sugar
in wine is residual, unfermented sugar because the fermentation
was stopped before the yeast converted all of the sugar to
alcohol. In some cases, the winemaker ferments to dryness and
adds back grape juice or grape-juice concentrate to sweeten the
wine.

When the wine is balanced, the flavors, body and the relative
level of the components interact harmoniously. Since alcohol
gives wine body, a glass of red Bordeaux from a poor vintage
that’s only 10.5 percent alcohol may feel thin and unsatisfying
on the palate. Conversely, a Napa Cab from a hot vintage better
have plenty of flavor and body to stand up to 15 percent alcohol.
Otherwise, you will have spent a lot of money on something that
makes you feel like a fire-breathing dragon.

The source: Mainly the alcohol and grape
extracts (red); barrel-aging can increase the body due to
evaporation.